The Legacy of Lynching: A Sociological Analysis

The Legacy of Lynching provides a critical social theory of the history of lynching as a pedagogy of social and political violence, power, and control (to identify-find-kill-display the body of the racial Other).The theory emphasizes the final stage of display as what truly constitutes a lynching and differentiates it from other forms of violence (race riots, recreational murder, racial hunting, bombings, and disappearances) and challenges other definitions of lynching (hanging, mob violence, extra-judicial, and racial terror).The book examines the socio-historical record of lynching in the United States, with additional attention to lynching activity and imagery of Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and India, to surface the nature of lynching as a public spectacle with important critical social and political dimensions that enact power in visible ways across racialized bodies, peoples, and spaces. Lynching, in this book, is presented not just as a historical phenomenon or as a set